


Let Your Guard Down

by fandomfluffandfuck



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angel Wings, Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dark, Dreams, Guardian Angel Bucky Barnes, Hallucinations, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, Mental Anguish, Mental Health Issues, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Nomad Steve Rogers, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes, References to Depression, Sharing a Bed, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Touch-Starved, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29853144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomfluffandfuck/pseuds/fandomfluffandfuck
Summary: Steve is on the run from his snap, from his responsibilities, from his team, from the government, and from himself.He does not expect to have a visitor while on the run.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 14
Kudos: 30





	Let Your Guard Down

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags please! 
> 
> I don't know where this came from in me, I was in the shower and my brain went... _Pre-war Bucky looks like an angel and Nomad Steve probably thinks he's a devil or a sinner so. Maybe. What if we do guardian angel Bucky visiting nomad Steve?_ ...but it’s pretty heavy, so be weary.  
> Also, this was meant for Tumblr but then it got out of hand lol.

Steve startles awake, adrenaline rushing into him like freezing water through a broken glass pane, torn between gripping his own chest with the pounding of his heart or curling his hands into fists with the need to fight and protect himself he bolts upright. The mattress screams underneath him. His eyes sweep from left to right, trying to reason with his exhausted brain and failing to decipher enemies from ordinary objects in the inky, unsafe darkness. 

Suddenly his eyes, dragged down by bruise-like dark circles, screech to a hault. 

_Bucky is standing at the foot of his bed._

Well, he's standing at the bed that he's supposed to be resting in for tonight, its not his bed. The sheets are beat up and stained but impressively intact for ancient, shady hotel he's sheltering in for now, for tonight; tomorrow he's going to get up and run again. And, well, the Bucky standing, hovering, in the room that is not _his_ Bucky but... the tired brain is an easy thing to fool and Steve's is more tired than most.

Steve's full body freezes, caught between hysterical laughter and hysterical sobs. His chest is painfully tight and heavy, and his arms have started to shake with the effort of holding it up. Lead settles inside him, rotting his insides in the way the paint that peeled off of his less than ideal first home back in the twenties. 

"Buck?" He hears the beloved name come out of his own mouth, it sounds like he's speaking into a tin can, his ears ring. He is unsettled and awed by the hallucination - watery and pale - in front of him. 

It's Bucky.

 _Well..._ the details aren't there but it's close enough. Easy on his overtaxed eyes, smoothing over any cracks in what his mind can't project into the solidness of reality.

His hair is short again, styled cleanly the way it always used to be, a lifetime ago, pushed back from his face. Long on the top, short on the sides. Youthful and unafraid. He's clean shaven, skin exposed, smooth and forgiving against the rare pass of a scowl or frown. He is obviously young and _sweet,_ yet to know all of the horrors that await him, promised to him by the cruelty that is the huntress of the universe. He's dressed in what looks like a white sheet, unstained, the kind that delicately drapes the shapes of expertly carved stone in museums, solid and hard but softened by skill. He is soft because he only has the skill of a young man. Not a killer. He has white, sweeping wings resting at eased attention behind him, like a lozenge against a sandpaper throat. 

He looks like Steve's unearned heaven.  
  
His heart _aches._

Barbed wire tickles his palms and makes wine pour down to his hand, dripping off his fingertips. It crawls up his forearms to his biceps and shoulders, choking his throat, slithering to his head. Crowning him with dread. 

He did not _do_ enough.

He did not try hard enough.

He did not save him. _He could not._ _He failed him._

Steve falls back onto the bed, barely feeling the mattress catch him at all. Focused fully on the plunge of his heart through his body like a spear, ripping vital organs to shreds, spreading blood through his insides like a disease. He swallows a mouthful of dread. He just wants one night, _just one,_ of actual sleep. Not nightmares or visions or memories. 

He _needs_ to sleep. He'd be dead if not for the serum. 

A million times over he would be dead without the breath of life of the serum pulsing through his veins and striking down every single personal pleasure of his life. Strangling him and those he loves, leaving them behind for the call of duty or the disciplined march of time itself. 

He would be dead this time because he cannot sleep. _He should be dead._

He stares at the empty, familiar slate of the back of his eyelids... at least tonight's visitor seems to be good.

Steve heaves a sigh up through his worn, torn esophagus- it burns like inhaling smoke. Shutting his eyes fitfully, Steve hopelessly tries to get back to sleep. 

Dream, hallucination, or vision Bucky does not go away. 

Steve can feel him staring; his pale, hauntingly gorgeous eyes sizing him up, finding him _lacking,_ finding him as nothing but a _shell._ His gaze feels like ghostly, cold fingers dragged feather light over gritty, feverish skin. Chilling, yet, somehow caring. Steve doesn't know how anyone can care for him. He doesn't... he does not deserve caring. He is not like a beloved toy, worn to the bone but still held close, special and treasured. He is guilty. He is a failure. He is-

He is not this Bucky's Steve. Not anymore. 

He shuts his eyes tighter. 

After a while Steve, exhausted, finds himself dragging through the boggy depths of the hazy state between reality and dreams. Slogging through, lifting his feet heavily up through the chilled, grey, slimy mud of the half awake, half dream state and questioning his own sanity for doing it the whole while. Every step feels like a step closer to his grave but standing still feels like dying in place. _Which is better? Does it matter?_ He keeps walking, tossing over onto his side, muscles sore and weak. His eyes are barely closed because even his facial muscles are giving up.

Bucky is still at the foot of his bed. 

Steve can feel his confusion, blurring with his own like oils across a slick canvas, turning brownish and greyish and gross as they mix. His mind is a soup, unpleasant and unwanted as the slushy, muddy mix of melted snow and earth a week after a winter storm.

He turns to the other side. He gags, dizzy, at the drag and cling of sheets over his sweaty, dirty skin. 

_Why would he dream of Bucky like that..?_ He never really did believe in heaven. He has no angels. No faith. 

_What kind of all loving God would send someone to hell for uncontrollably loving another person?_

_What kind of all loving God would take away the only person he has left?_

_What kind of all loving God would breath life into his broken body just to strip him of any kind of joy without giving him a way out?_

_What-_

"You're lonely, Steve." Bucky whispers, well, it _feels_ like a whisper. It doesn't sound like one- it... it doesn't sound like anything. He only hears it in his head, joining the chorus of all the others he already was hearing. 

Steve rolls onto his back and away from his voice. He doesn't need the reminder. 

The bed dips. 

Steve's fingers curl into fists at his sides, emotions jagged and uncontrollable, slicing him into two. He wants to roll towards the weight, towards the comfort of fiction, and curl up into a ball until he's so small that he can't be seen. But he also needs to jerk up and settle into the worn-in stance of defense and fight. It's been so long since movement near him meant anything but a snarling beast waiting to tear his head off his shoulders and peel his skin from his bones. 

The decision is made for him.

A blanket of warmth and _safety_ settles over him. A tug of strength that must come from outside of himself slides his heavy eyelids up. 

Bucky is laying next to him. 

Steve's body goes limp in visceral _relief,_ a tangle of bent, beat up armor that's been accompanying him for too long drops from the surface of his skin, his grip relaxing, pain shooting to his uncurling fingers as blood returns. Circulating once more. The feeling of it is dusty, unfamiliar with unuse. 

Fingers, dexterous and fragile - yet to be used to claw up from the depths of hell and back to him - brush through the thick beard he's grown. Covering his jaw in another incarnation of his defense against all the rest of the world. It feels... _it feels._

Steve has not been touched in too long. 

Bucky does not say anything. He cups his cheek like he is not a lamb staring in the face of a lion. Moments from slaughter. 

His eyes shut, tugged closed on borrowed strength like tides to the moon. The weight - imagined but so, _so_ _real_ \- of Bucky's head gets laid on his chest. So trusting and gentle that Steve has to clench his jaw to avoid harshly shoving Bucky away for his own safety, rejection to the kindness thickening in his veins- the worst kind of sickness. 

He does not know violence. Steve will not be the first to introduce him. _He will not._

Steve never slept with a teddy bear ~~he always had Bucky~~ but he imagines... he imagines it must be like this. This feeling. 

Before Steve can be abandoned back to the endless, nightmarish whirlpool that all of his brain is now Bucky's pure, soft lips mouth the word _"sleep"_ into his chest, opening and closing his jaw - which is still shadowed by the nostalgia of childhood memories with its softness... Steve remembers the sight well - to the drum of his broken heart.

Steve doesn't wake up screaming so loud that even the serum can't save him from turning hoarse, he doesn't wake up with a heart kicking against his ribs trying to leave him like anything he's called his own, he doesn't wake up in free fall as he plummets to the ground, midway through rolling out of bed. He doesn't not wake up after another sleepless night spent staring at stained ceilings or less than structurally sound walls. 

He wakes up held down under the weight of a body. 

A small, delicate, _solid_ body. 

Bucky is still here. 

Steve swallows, he cannot accept it. A million depressing, true statements rise to the top of his throat, stinging like stomach acid being vomited back up. Things that all validate his presence; things like, _you shouldn't be here, why are you here?, you need to leave, please, please just stay. just for a little longer._

None of them acknowledge the reality of the situation. Something has finally given. 

His sanity has broken.

He's hallucinating...

 _But._ His body feels so real, tucked under his arm like he's worthy of protecting anything after being unable to protect earth in of itself. To protect the same man seeking warmth in his body. His skin is so warm and smooth and _real._ His eyelashes are just the length that Steve remembers them being, even before his memory was made perfect and undefeatable.

 _But-_ he has wings. 

Wings that are huge. Big enough that they, when folded, brush the backs of his knees and come up to his shoulders. They're white and pure. Untouchable, especially untouchable with his calloused, dirt caked, deeply flawed hands- hands that will forever be soaked in blood that does not belong to him and was not his choice to choose the fate of. He does not believe in God and he is not a God... _so why? Why is he "worthy"?_

He has wings that spill over the bed, feathers soft and perfect, better than even one thousand thread count, Egyptian cotton. Especially against the ratty sheets that have seen a million sad cases, passing through, now being used to wrap him up like an outward expression of his insides, just simplified. Mummifying him. 

Bucky shifts and mumbles in his sleep. 

Steve's chest splits apart, each rib cracking and blooming openward, like a flower, but bloody and raw. Like a wrecking ball to his serum he thinks, he knows, he does not deserve this kind of hallucination. He does not deserve comfort, he should be haunted until he is a walking ghost himself, gaunt and skeletal. A shambling, unfortunately still living _corpse._

His fractured mind's torturous projection of Bucky yawns, _"mornin'."_

His small, unscathed hands wrap his own up like a boxers's hand wraps, guiding his scarred ones to his wings.

They are even softer than they look. He's too frightened to move his hands, he could not bare the pain of stroking his palms down only to see smears of mud and oil and blood over the surface of his pure, downy wings. He has washed his hands. He has showered. He did both, scrubing rashes into his skin, before bed, acting out his only ritual... almost like saying a prayer before a meal. Before Bucky was borne of his fractured mind. 

But he is not clean. 

Bucky- rather it, his hallucination, is a slice of heaven that he does not deserve, he has done all but earn it. 

He adds salt to his festering wounds by opening his decaying mouth, words uncurling from his tongue like a rush of overwhelmingly bad breath, _"I don’t believe in you."_

Bucky looks steadily into his eyes, determination morphing him from a lamb to a young wolf in a single breath. "I know you don't belive in angels. Much less guardian angels..." his bravery steals what's left of his heart, certainty lacing his words in the same way that fate laces their beings together, forever and always. "But you believe me." 

The rigid, rusted skeleton of the mantle of _Captain America_ that was holding his frale body up, on its last legs, crumbles. Falling to the ground hollowly, clanging, leaving him in a heap on his angel's chest. In his arms.

Steve weeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me about your feelings towards this if you'd be so kind. Kudos and comments are totally appreciated!
> 
> _P.S. if you're also reading my "Setting: In A Honeymoon" fic this is just a quick sidestep from that, I'm still working hard on it!_


End file.
